[RedDevil]

The video a few posts back shows how snow tires have twice as much grip on ice as all weather tires, and that's good. Studded tires do even better on ice, as mentioned.

Where snow tires really stand out is (predictably) in snowy conditions and especially just below freezing, on a road with a layer of hyper slippery flattened snow and some fresh new flakes on top - conditions all too common in our moderate winter climate.

That surface is very treacherous with ordinary tires, where the snow fills up the tire thread so the wheel is like a solid ice disk, making the upper layer of snow underneath melt under the contact pressure. Grip is even lower than on ice.

The thread of snow tires though has small ruts and soft rubber.
This prevents the snow from packing solid in the thread. Thread pressure will still melt the top layer of snow, but that escapes into the thread recesses.
Moreover, the finer detailing of the thread means it matches the small aberrations in the road surface better instead of riding and gliding on the tops.
It does not just have twice as much grip, like it does on ice.
It has ten times as much grip or even more.

I have scared myself so many times before with all my previous cars and their all season tires, that I have difficulty assessing the grip level of my current winter tires.
I cannot bring myself to exploring the limits as they are so far beyond what I was used to.